So this is another one of these made-for-TV historical things Rossellini was doing? The first one, L’età di Cosimo de Medici, was horrible.
This looks a lot less something you’d punish school children with as homework for a history class and more like an actual movie.
The acting style is an odd hybrid — it’s not naturalistic, but neither is it just people declaiming their lines without emotion. Instead, they act like their natural state is to speak well-formed literary quotations — they speak in entire paragraphs.
So somewhere half-way between Bresson and Brando.
It’s cool.
This film is inexplicably entertaining. The mix of well-presented scientific theories and the general drama of Pascal’s life is just kind of gripping.
And it looks really good, so:
Blaise Pascal. Roberto Rossellini. 1972.
This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.